Interviewing him in London many years ago, I asked Daniyal Mueenuddin what he was working on after his acclaimed story collection In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (2009). Mueenuddin responded laughingly with a digression about an eccentric servant of his parents’ in the 1970s.

So “spoiled” was this domestic help that he ended up wanting to split the family pile between the other workers and himself. Mueenuddin said this servant, who represented the “zeitgeist” of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s revolutionary era, dreamed of “a 1920s or 1930s Russian situation, with the owners living in the coat cupboard.”

Mueenuddin has finally answered my query with an eagerly-awaited new book that is part short story collection and part semi-autobiographical novel. As with my earlier column on Arundhati Roy’s memoir, I do not present a full review here, for that work has already been commissioned by Dawn. Instead, what follows is an attempt to register the volume’s mood and grain: its tonal shifts, literary textures and restless formal experimentation.

In This Is Where the Serpent Lives, the Pakistani-American author and mango farmer picks up his servant memory and runs with it. He ventures into appropriately Russian territory indebted to Tolstoy or Pasternak, complete with a 19th century-style dramatis personae in the front matter. This is a richly dark text of cross-cutting stories about characters from different social classes, most of whom live in rural south Punjab. Among several story arcs, it charts one young boy Saqib’s rise “from houseboy to munshi” and his fall into crushed ruin.

As with In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, Mueenuddin continues his interest in the dilutions to, but not demise of, feudal structures. Also coming under his gimlet eye and scalpel pen is the concomitant rise of the business class, made up of estate managers, ambitious policemen and goondas with deeper roots in the soil of agricultural Pakistan than the urbanised feudal class.

In this milieu, power does not lie around for the taking. Mueenuddin’s remarkable book shows that in Punjab, at least, people need sharp elbows just to keep what they have. The consequences of this ruthlessness are a battle of the sexes, as well as the deeply hostile fraternal relations of Cain and Abel or Esau and Jacob (the book, its title and its cover design are masculinist and biblical).

Above all, the relationship between the ruling class and their servants is shot through with mistrust and exploitation. The main mistress readers are shown, Shahnaz, loftily opines that her retainers “infest” the house. Despite this dehumanising language and her manifold flaws, Shahnaz is a sophisticated and engaging character I would have liked to see more of.

Both “money and power” prove to be “sexual” in this text, just as the epigraph to In Other Rooms, Other Wonders evoked the Punjabi saying that all murders arise from zan (women), zameen (land) and zar (gold).

Mueenuddin’s prose is unadorned and lacks gimmicks, but his vast vocabulary and bold imagination disgorge sparkling gems. Take this metaphor about young carrom players who ponder moves “with the seriousness of parliamentary debaters, discussing strategy.” Or a striking simile about a woman servant “who haunted the place like a resident ghost [but] had disapparated somewhere.” This phrase distils character, atmosphere and motion into a single comic image. The verb “disapparate,” borrowed from the lexicon of magic in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter storyworld, immediately undercuts supernatural expectations with its firmly realist style.

Continuing the spectral images, another female character “had always been circumspect, self-effacing, slipping past and ghosting up the stairs.” That coinage “ghosting” reminds me of novelist Hari Kunzru’s point from a keynote lecture on “Writing in a Digital Age” that fiction’s strength is “nouning the verbs, … verbing the nouns and opening things up that we thought were fixed.” This kind of linguistic innovation is exactly what Mueenuddin unobtrusively achieves.

His book stages a Fanonian drama of postcolonial power. A new comprador class rises not by incremental reform but the grubby accretions of office, patronage and violence. Mueenuddin shows that, while the British masters were rightly defenestrated in 1947, structures of internal colonisation and lordly entitlement remain intact.

The promises of land reform and redistributed power from “Comrade Bhutto” are wistfully interpreted as counterfactual by Yazid, a poor orphan. He regards this rhetoric of “real justice for everyone” not as deliverable policy but a rich man’s performance. Yazid’s rueful concession to a social superior that “I doubt it’s for people like me. It’s for you, your people” crystallises the book’s verdict. Political language is easily co-opted and progressiveness gets corrupted.

The book’s Old Testament imagery thus has less to do with piety than social shorthand. Where formal institutions fail, private codes — the ‘eye for an eye’ vengeance of family, faction and feudal custom — govern lives in this ‘man’s world.’ In a grotesque episode of self-harm, Yazid stabs his own leg to shock a rich antagonist, the wound being luminously compared to “a gill on a fish.” This vignette encapsulates a desperate improvisation of agency when law is absent. Hence the serpent motif. Social relations are venomous, coiling around property, honour and desire.

Formally, the book returns to the ‘novel in a story sequence’ mode. Major figures apparate (including a brief cameo by Sohail Harouni, K. K. Harouni’s nephew from In Other Rooms, Other Wonders) and then recede. This structural choice recalls Alice Munro’s Canadian asymmetries and Shyam Selvadurai’s queering of form in a Sri Lankan civil war context. The narrative voice stays fairly constant and always lyrical, though. It is unmistakably Mueenuddin’s own, influenced by Urdu, Punjabi and their fictions.

The farming scenes of cucumbers tended beneath polytunnels and sprayed with pesticides are depicted with a granular realism worthy of Tolstoy. Yet, as with Anna Karenina, I preferred the trysts, parties and affairs. They provide more women’s voices and finer moral theatre than the farming minutiae.

The book does not create a tidy social panorama but something messier and open-ended. Particularly in its first two thirds, this genre-defying, formally capacious and ethically watchful text attains a sustained and original accounting of how old hierarchies are recast for a modern age.

The columnist is Professor of Global Literature at the University of York in the UK, and author of five books. Bluesky: @clarachambara

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, January 25th, 2026